Talk:SorryNotSorry/@comment-5483266-20161011001610
I was originally just going to rant on the topic of representation, but somehow this became a sloppily compiled patchwork of my life story, lol. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up internalizing Western values, I never knew precisely where I belonged. I attended an elementary school that was majority Caucasian, where I was constantly ridiculed for my Chinese name, my natural Asian features, the region my family originated from, and the ethnic food my mother poured her heart into, whom sacrificed her livelihood to raise me and dedicated meals as a sign of her love in lieu of affectionate words and platitudes. I wasn't hurled with racialized slurs until a few years later, but the sentiment that I was some sort of alien and inferior to the other white kids still lingered just beneath the surface. Visiting my extended family in their homeland, the country of their roots was another struggle of its own. They'd accuse me, whether it was with overt hostility or laced in false courtesy, of not being Asian enough due to my individualistic ideals, my clumsy butchering of the Cantonese language juxtaposed with my fluency in English, my refusal to conform to their standards of gendered behavior, and staggering inability to live up to their expectations. I was simultaneously too wild, yet too quiet. Too polished, yet not demure, obedient, or pristine enough. Too outspoken in things that ostensibly didn't matter, too defiant for my own good, but never *enough* of anything whenever I tried. It escalated to the point where I felt like the very essence of my existence seemed to be fundamentally opposed to their culture, although I was never once ashamed of my ethnicity. I was a foreigner regardless of wherever I hailed: in Canada I was nothing more than the product of diaspora, and I witnessed my cultural heritage being reduced to endless series of 'ching chong' jokes, manual labour, martial arts, cheap greasy food in takeout boxes from Chinatown and the occasional cheongsam worn by a white girl for #aestheticgoals. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, I was too whitewashed; an Asian face with a deviant mind that didn't respect Asian customs or traditions, whose principles were misaligned and thus incompatible with Asian social constructs. Just like my ethnicity, I was a source of both great burden and pride. This is the price I paid for assuming a hyphenated identity. So I lived vicariously through fiction. I drowned myself in every medium of entertainment that was available, and learned to identify with characters and people that looked nothing like me. Yet all this time, I felt deprived of true validation, of something that I couldn't pinpoint at that tumultuous stage in my life. Then I got older. Through that experience, I was subjected to the consequences that entail when you embody the intersection where race, gender, and sexual orientation collide. I've been bullied, harassed, manhandled by people who projected their stereotypes of the docile, exotic, subservient Asian woman onto me. I've been told to shut up whenever I had something to say and wanted to use my voice to express myself, degraded on a personal level when I diverged from accepted norms of both Asian and Western societies. So many people have this ignorant and absurd misconception that the model minority myth as it pertains to Asians couldn't possibly be a negative association. But let me tell you, as someone who developed mental illness and was severely depressed in adolescence, there was a shitton of pressure on me to succeed in every endeavour, at the expense of my self-esteem and actualization. On the occasions where I didn't apply myself as well as I could have and my grades reflected my lack of motivation (because wouldn't you know it, I was more concerned with getting through each day without breaking down instead of being defined by arbitrary numbers), there came the remarks that I was a failure to my race and by extension, a failure of a human being. Yet whenever I did excel in a subject and wished to celebrate my achievement, every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears I invested in my studies and projects was undermined and dismissed because, well, "Asians are supposed to be smart! It's in their genes!" and I got silenced for "being too arrogant." Mental illness isn't discussed in my family. To my knowledge, discourse on mental illness is barely addressed in Chinese culture. From the heated arguments I've had with my mother, it's come to my understanding that they subscribe to the myth that if you work hard and be diligent, happiness and prosperity will come naturally. I still haven't told my parents that there's a distinct chance in the near future that I may have a relationship with a woman. But now I justify that decision not out of fear that they'll disown me and spread the word to my intolerant relatives, but because I don't believe that anyone is entitled to details of my love life that don't directly relate to or affect them. How I choose to perform womanhood is entirely up to me, and over the past decade I have slowly but surely learned to embrace these intricacies of my character. So I stopped confiding my insecurities and making homes in people who I knew wouldn't understand or reciprocate. Time is a precious resource and after wasting enough of it for a full decade of my life (granted, most of which by forces beyond my control), I sought my own empowerment through my passions and lifeline: storytelling. But every television program and film I devoured had a dearth of Asian representation, despite the fact that Asians as a whole constitute two thirds of the world population. Time and time again, with each form of media I consumed, the message that I didn't matter or that I wasn't as beautiful as my white peers was drilled into my head. Then Daisy 'Skye' Johnson happened. And she was a revelation. Here was a young woman with an origin story three seasons in the making, who is a central part of the narrative and is the heroine of her own destiny. She was intelligent, snarky, selfless, empathetic, emotional, humane, and earnest. She represented the hybrid of two cultures while retaining her autonomy and staying true to convictions and morals that are not necessarily shared by her comrades or immediate family. Over the course of her emotional journey, she's crashed and burned, made mistakes, suffered through trauma, lost too many loved ones, and is currently wounded and maimed from deeply ingrained psychological scars, much like I was not too long ago. But when she triumphs, she astonishes. She resonates with humanity. She survived abuse, weaponized her curiosity and thirst for knowledge, and strives to save the world from its evils, social injustice, and corruption. She defies all the terrible, disgusting and racist stereotypes attributed to Asian women that used to shatter my sense of self-perception. So for fandom to diminish Daisy's importance and exclude her from their praise of female superheroes, to call her "annoying" and "the worst Mary Sue in Marvel history" for exhibiting traits that would normally be exalted in white characters, it's a fucking slap in the face. As it is for Disney to even entertain the possibility of casting Mulan as a non-Chinese actress and inserting a white male lead to serve as the audience surrogate. It's a gross insult to the generations of strong women in my community who were taught the tale of Mulan in their schools. It's an aggressive reassertion of all the values indoctrinated in me as a child that people like myself and numerous other Asian-Americans/Canadians are still struggling to unlearn to this very day. "But wait!!" white people will say with fake exclamation points dripping with condescension that masquerade as liberal awareness, "There's Cristina Yang! Jessica Huang! Joan Watson! Kira Yukimura! Soso! That Asian pilot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens with ten seconds of screentime!! Don't be greedy!" Yes. Sure. A grand total of six characters that exist within the entire realm of fiction, only some of which are well-developed and substantial! Asian erasure and racism is over!!1 To which I say, for lack of a better phrase, fuck that noise. We have lived here for centuries. We exist. We deserve better. And we have plenty of stories worth exploring and sharing with the world.